| 15 March 2010
After four difficult springs, the 2009 maple syrup season will go down as a historic season, with Quebec maple syrup production hitting 109.4 million pounds. Producers have been thrilled with the news, especially after they produced only half of this volume the previous year. Even though it is impossible right now to predict production for the 2010 harvest, the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers has once again increased the quota for all producers to 100% in order to respond to global demand. Furthermore, 300,000 new taps are being utilized for 2010 and 2011, which will add to the current quota of 110 million pounds, a huge difference from the 68 million in 2003.
The 2009 production was enough to fulfil maple syrup demand worldwide. This comes as welcome relief, especially after the collapse of stocks observed at the end of 2008 which raised prices. Thanks to last year's great harvest, syrup prices have been kept under control. "Favourable climatic conditions, moderate snowfall, the increase in quotas and optimal production efficiency have all contributed to a record season in 2009", outlined Mr. Serge Beaulieu, president of the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers. "We cannot produce maple syrup without ideal conditions, as was the case in 2008 for example, when only 58.7 million pounds was produced, half of what we have achieved in 2009."
| 12 March 2010
Educating yourself about wine has many advantages. For instance, it gives you one more reason to look down upon Australians. Also, learned discourse about wine is an excellent way to bore your relatives. But the most important benefit of memorizing the 1855 Bordeaux classification is that it’s naturally intimidating. I just have to mumble something about gravel soil types and my friends begin squirming like worms dangling from a hook. As that great lover of wine Emperor Caligula once said, “Let them hate me, so long as they fear me.”
But there is one thing about wine that everybody dreads, and connoisseurs most of all: blind tastings. They are unavoidable in the wine world. Tasting blind is not merely the best way of assessing a bottle’s quality — it is a public ritual contrived to expose ignorance and shatter pride. Horror stories about these tastings are a particularly amusing sub-genre of wine writing. For instance, there is the tale of the tasting panel at the famous 1976 Judgment of Paris, whose members bickered throughout the proceedings about which samples were French and which American. More recently, a study of judges at the California State Fair’s prestigious wine competition found that only 10% of them gave the same wine the same rating when it was given to them blind on more than one occasion. Some judges failed a certain sample on one day, and the next day handed it a gold medal.